Santa Clara County Local News: Families & Children

As the need for child care centers in San Jose grows, a new city partnership may help boost day care slots.
To alleviate some ongoing challenges with day cares staying afloat, San Jose gave $1 million to Upwards to help child care centers streamline their operations and be more efficient. Its Boost program will provide support to 133 San Jose day care centers serving low-income families for a year, giving one-on-one business coaching and helping them digitize operations. Providers will be able to track attendance and payments through Upwards' software, which will free up time to focus on child care and enable them to enroll more children.
"In San Jose, only 20% of children aged 0 to 2 whose parents are working have access to child care," Jeff Scott, city housing spokesperson, told San José Spotlight. "By strengthening child care providers through grants for programs like Boost, we are supporting new child care spots that can accommodate a variety of family schedules and needs. The early results from Boost indicate we’re on the right track."
Boost Program Manager Judy Ahumana said since launching the program last August, more than half of participants have already expanded their capacity to care for more children. Many providers are working to become large home day cares, which can serve up to 14 children. Upwards may also provide subsidies for teacher assistant salaries and stipends to offset operational costs like license fees.
“Through the program, we really want to teach our caretakers how to become self-sufficient in running their operations,” Ahumana told San José Spotlight. “Running a business at the same time (that they are taking care of children) can become very cumbersome, so it's been amazing to see how the participants have picked up the technology and are connecting with our team to receive business coaching.”

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